Social and entity experiences are increasingly integrated in commercial web search engines and portals. For example, if a user's friend has liked a review about a recently released movie, a search engine service (e.g., BING) may annotate a search result page with a photo of the user's friend when the user issues a query for that movie name. As another example, if the user browses a sports team, a search engine service may recommend content related to the team. For example, pertinent information may be displayed in a sidebar, including relationships of the team with other entities or items. For example, enabling technologies for these experiences may link people, entities (or items), and content in a “Web of Things” paradigm.
Not all of these links may be extracted with equal precision. For example, links between people and entities may be reliably obtained through social signals such as “likes.” As another example, links between people and content may be mined from web search logs. However, many web pages (and other documents) may include a large number of entities or items, some of which may be substantially salient to the overall content of the pages or documents, and some of which may be less salient.